Amazon Takes on Oracle and IBM With SimpleDB — Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming. Amazon has just added an enterprise-class database called SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure …

What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB — Well after being under NDA for so long, I'm glad to be able to say that Amazon SimpleDB has gone into limited beta. Congratulations to everyone on the SDS / SimpleDB team; their several years of work on SimpleDB (formerly called SDS) is a brilliant piece of engineering.

Economics that are impossible to stop — A few days ago, Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web services (AWS) evangelist visited my class and got a report of what we'd built over the course of the last semester on top of AWS. Each student had built part of a project that eventually used 25-30 independent machines.

Googlepedia — Just to underscore the impetus behind the launch of Googlepedia - er, Knol - I went back to rerun a test I first ran over a year ago to see how high Wikipedia pages rank in a random set of Google searches. Here were the results on August 10, 2006: — World War II: #1 — Israel: #1

A Year Later, the Same Scene: Long Lines for the Elusive Wii — SAN FRANCISCO — Linda Beattie is trying desperately to pay Nintendo $250, but the company is not cooperating. — Two weeks ago, Ms. Beattie went to a video game retailer in the Bay Area in search of a Wii, Nintendo's intensely popular video game machine.

The skills you need to succeed — One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker. — In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

How to create custom ringtones in GarageBand 4.1.1 — With GarageBand 4.1.1 you can export your original song, your original audio recordings, or use Apple Loops and iLife jingles to create a custom ringtone for your iPhone. — Here's what you need to do it: — GarageBand 4.1.1 or later

The Promise of Social Network Advertising — How much can social networks net? — Social networking is an Internet success story. — This year, 37% of the US adult Internet population used online social networking at least once a month. That figure will rise to 49% in 2011.

Webkinz Advertises, and Parents Say That's OK — Kids' plush toy social network Webkinz.com has started running advertising, a move that, if recent articles in New York Times and Silicon Alley Insider are to be believed, has greatly upset parents. In fact, whatever controversy exists seems …

The Fact And Fiction Of Sam Sethi — So Sam Sethi, former TechCrunch UK editor, announced the closing of his Blognation blog network today. Hey lays 100% of the blame for the failure on me personally. And while I agree with Mathew Ingram, Techfold and others that it isn't appropriate to lay blame on others for your own failure.

Officially unlocked iPhones not really unlocked — It turns out that the officially (Apple-sanctioned) unlocked iPhone you bought for 649 Euros (about US$965) from Orange in France — which, according to some reports, accounts for up to 20% of total iPhone sales in France — is not really unlocked.

How Goldman Won Big On Mortgage Meltdown — A Team's Bearish Bets Netted Firm Billions; A Nudge From the CFO — The subprime-mortgage crisis has been a financial catastrophe for much of Wall Street. At Goldman Sachs Group Inc., thanks to a tiny group of traders, it has generated …

YouTube adds cool visualization for browsing related videos — For a while, YouTube was just, well, YouTube. Now under Google's wing, the popular video sharing site receives the random, occasional upgrade. Here's a new one: You can now browse videos related to the one you're watching through an interactive web-like interface.